On the plus side, my bike doesn’t go “fut fut fut” when I brake anymore!

On the plus side, I have another day where I have good live test data for trying to print weather alerts, like air quality ones! Because the air is sort of dangerous. Again. Sigh.

On the plus side, it’s a new month and so I cut up last month’s amazing page from our Japanese frogs calendar (I bought it in Japan, it’s got frogs doing things on it, they’re amazing) and I am going to glue them to things. (This is a real, plain plus-side.) (If you are curious what it looks like, kind of, these are the same frogs in a previous year’s calendar. Google translate => Japanese phrase in Google image search => second result.)

Went on an amazing dosa quest with Steve to the vegan Dosa Man, and ate dosa and samosa (<3 <3) in the park in the shade and ran my mouth and Steve kindly facilitated the transformation of “me running my mouth” => “part of a conversation.”

Came back and spent some time doing awesome things with LEDs with Ranjit — he built a little Muybridge-inspired lantern, and we did terrible ideas and good ideas to it, and he makes hardware hacking seem more accessible than anyone I have ever met. Also now I know what that void business is about at the beginning of a C function (or method, or class, or whatever it is)! Neat. It’s just where you say what the function returns. And if it’s nothing (i.e. the function just does things, but doesn’t return anything), then the answer is “void.”

Julia Evans (awesome RC alum and programmer and Python community person and omg yes) has some post that I can’t locate about how saying “I don’t know/understand that” (at RC, in the world, etc.) is awesome because it gives you SUPERPOWERS for learning new things! If someone is telling you about something, they probably know something about it, and they can probably teach you some things. And I keep telling this to people, and because it’s Recurse, we talk about how it’s cool to say “I don’t know” and learn new things, and, yay.

I also finally, toward the end of the day, got more emoji into my weather program (yay!), but ALSO I got optional weather alert information to display (or not display/crash, depending on whether there are any active weather alerts for that location). How fun!

Would you believe I feel like I accomplished almost nothing today? It’s true. “I just did, like, a thing to my little weather program; it was kind of silly, mostly.”

But I am going to go home at a reasonable hour and maybe even get to bed before midnight. It could happen!

Woke up with a headache. Tried to wait out the headache. Tried to ibuprofen the headache. How about breakfast? How about lying on the couch? Reading? Closing your eyes? Taking a nap? Headache, headache, headache.

Got to RC kinda in time for Ranjit’s excellent Arduino exploration talk, which made me super happy. My appearance made the audience three people, which was kind of a perfect size. Alicia asked really good questions. I’m starting to think maybe I’ll finally take the leap and try some hardware stuff. I want to hack a dress so bad.

Went for a sweets & coffee walk with a few folks, came back and did Positive Peer Pressure time with Alicia so we could get some blog stuff done. Introduced her to Paper in case she wanted to draw anything for her posts; she ended up creating a great graphic explanation of her recent explorations with py2app (which she presented last week!).

The one code-related thing I started digging into at the end of the day was “how do I pull a small amount of relevant data from Dark Sky’s alert objects?” I want to be able to print a little bit of alert info in Weather Balloon if it’s relevant (and, “happily,” we’ve had two days in a row of air-quality alerts this week, so I have the data I need to play with).

Turns out alert objects are lists that contain dictionaries (two, this time; looks like that’s because there are two alerts: one from NJ, and one from NY. Sigh). My love for bpython grows — I’m enjoying it even more than IPython (!). It’s not perfect, but nothing is, and it’s still a joy to play with.

And now it’s time for art night! Postcards? Friendship bracelet? Cloth-pad sewing? Time to find out!

On time for check-ins! The people for the group I signed up for weren’t there, but two other people were (all three of us missed check-ins yesterday), so we had some sort of Rebels’ Check-in and I ended up feeling really positive about it (and talking honestly about what I’ve been working on). And maybe Jeff will teach me some Python/database things, soon or after I’ve studied them some more on my own! Rad.

Had a morning of a bunch of great conversations and NO code. Welp.

But also there was AbstractSaladFactory, and I finally remembered to bring something to share.

One of the residents had shared this: http://www.station-c.com/open-salad-tuesdays/

We RC’d it, whatever that means, and now it’s a semi-spontaneous “everybody who wants salad, just bring a salad ingredient,” and then we all get salad with a bunch of delicious things in it (and nothing we don’t individually want). I didn’t make enough salad for myself, and now I’m hungry again, but it was so good, and really fun to share food with people like that.

Headed back to my Udacity course, which I’m really enjoying, aside from the zoos and the fish-eating (at least it’s, like, bears eating fish; that’s fine). It is the most un-vegan MOOC I’ve ever tried, but aside from that, it’s cheerful and interactive and light on its feet.

Installed an OS X system update (ooh! adult points ++), and when restarting, I thought, “oh, some of these windows with many tabs should be closed.” In theory, this is wise; in practice, I have this problem where I forgot about the Emily McDowell tab and everything she makes is basically magic (did you hear about her amazing empathy cards?). If you ever want to get me a mug or an art (I have her “I am a grown-ass lady and I do what I want” at home) or a tote bag or notepads for loving mischief or really anything, you know where to go.

Not such a code day. But went for a run after RC with RC friends (OMG! first run in several months), and then it was movie night and we watched Big Hero 6, and some days just aren’t super productive in the ways we expected.

Didn’t get out the door on time, and couldn’t make up the time on the funky loaner bike. (I am SO looking forward to getting my bike back today.) Missed check-ins, but didn’t miss resident Ranjit‘s “let’s play with words and see what mischief we can make” workshop shortly thereafter.

Unfortunately, I was distracted by trying to get IPython Notebooks up and running again on my computer. (They worked last week! In a virtual environment. For reasons I don’t entirely understand, it was important to me to get them running ~*~ globally ~*~, so off I went.)

DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE:

Doing the same thing got me different results
(if this is tl;dr to you, just skip to the horizontal line): Continue reading Recurse Center: week 9, day 1 →